Teacher on Two Wheels

Above:  My garden .  Above above:  A watermelon in the garden.

I’ve started a garden behind my house in Gulu. Of the gardens I’ve had in the past in New Jersey and Japan, this garden is the most healthy and least difficult to tend. The soil here is rich and strong, and, like a kiln that turns wet clay into beautiful pottery, it magically morphs seeds into thick plants.

I’m growing about 60 tomato plants of a local variety, a strain called Moneymaker. I don’t know if Moneymaker tomatoes are part of the famed group of seeds once designed specifically for the developing world, seeds that sparked the Green Revolution in Asia, but these seeds produce plants that are incredibly drought resistant and hearty. My plants can go seven or eight days straight without rain, persisting miraculously under the unrelenting blaze of the equatorial sunshine. In Japan and Jersey, plants under similar waterless, hot conditions would have surely withered away and died.

Being in the garden centers me.  After a stressful day, I can think of no place I’d rather be.

Above:  Some of the tomato plants

I live in a house that is equipped to host 36 people. !!! Every room but mine is filled with six beds (split up over two triple-bunk beds). The house is set on a nice plot of grassy land just outside of downtown Gulu. Currently, 11 teachers are staying in the house with me, but 20 students from the US are going to move in at the end of June. The students and teachers are part of a wave of visitors that washes over Invisible Children facilities each summer. Come mid-August, though, all visitors will have left Gulu and things will quiet down.